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City looks to make Cleveland Circle safer for pedestrians and bicyclists
By Oliver Blake on Fri, 04/28/2023 - 5:11pm
The Boston Transportation Department (BTD) is looking at adding new dedicated bike lanes and crosswalks and traffic-slowing measures to the maelstrom at Cleveland Circle, where pedestrians, bicyclists, motorists and trolleys all share an increasingly congested and complex intersection.
BTD planners, who have been working with the Allston Brighton Health Collaborative on the proposal, hope to refine their plans with a "mobility walk" on Saturday, in which city transportation workers and mobility advocates will host walks around the circle for people to point out "mobility challenges" that need to be fixed. The event starts at 10 a.m. at Cassidy Playground.
BTD recently published a report on the current problems in Cleveland Circle and what it hopes to do both in the short term - starting with repainting lines on existing crosswalks and increasing the timing of pedestrian crossing lights, for example - and long term.
Additional crosswalks will be added to connect residential buildings to neighborhood recreational and commercial amenities. ...
Striping, signage, and flex posts will be used to create separated bike lanes. In many cases, parking-protected bike lanes will be appropriate quick fixes to separate moving bicycles from moving vehicles. Bicycle facilities will be constructed along Chestnut Hill Ave through Cleveland Circle, connecting Brookline to the existing lanes crossing Commonwealth Ave, and along Beacon St through the intersection and main commercial hub of the area.
The road will be restriped and repainted to reduce confusion and the amount of high-speed traffic in the area. Traffic calming measures, including flex post-marked curb extensions and narrowing of slip lanes, will be implemented. Delivery zones will be added per conversations with business needs, and parking will be reworked to accommodate as many cars as possible in a given time frame. Dedicated turn lanes and bus stops will be allocated to reduce traffic buildup.
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Comments
Action item to help keep pedestrians safe
Re-educate them to stop…. and look both ways. Lost art form. In the last month alone, I have seen at least 10 people not even stop or look before crossing the street. Safety starts with the individual then filters out to infrastructure and policy.
Better yet
Retrain drivers to observe speed limits, crosswalks, no turn on red signs, yield to pedestrian signs, etc.
Pedestrians who cross against the lights are a massive pain in the ass to cyclists, too, but they are likely to experience disaster in equal measure if they cause a collision with a cyclist. Both parties have a strong interest in not hitting each other.
Motorists in cars take up a lot more room, are far less maneuverable than cyclists, and are not likely to experience injury when they plow people down and are the ones who legally and morally need to be paying more attention. Statistics show that drivers are the safety problem.
Those dangerous pedestrians!
They could have killed someone!!!
OK but
How exactly do you educate the people who are hit on sidewalks, or sitting in the yard in front of their houses, or eating at a pizza place, to be more careful
Ah, the old Bart Simpson argument
"I'm going to drive on the sidewalk, and if any part of you should happen to fill that sidewalk, it's your own fault".
Tell me you've never seen Cleveland Circle...
...without telling me you've never seen Cleveland Circle.
Transportation Equity
Streetcars, Buses, and Trucks should have priority in Cleveland Circle. Pedestrians and bikes can go around the edges. Figure it out and suck it up. You can't have it both ways, and you can't paint over the tracks.
Humans need priority
Remember that.
Why should empty streetcars
Why should empty streetcars have priority over pedestrians?
What do you even mean by this?
You can't have it both ways? What are the two ways? There is only one way -- safety for everybody.
The big problem: it's no
The big problem: it's no longer a circle, but nobody ever bothered to redesign it properly. There have been plenty of quick "fixes" over the years, some involving paint, some involving very minimal curbs. But none actually reconfigured the big asphalt free-for-all.
The trolley tracks make it a little tricky, but it should still be possible to square it off into a normal-ish intersection without all the sweeping curves.
Also, "separate moving bicycles from moving vehicles"? Nope. BTD should know that bicycles are vehicles.
Cleveland Circle
Well, I'd expect surface improvements and light timing first. I suspect all the features they want to add will increase confusion and legal problems when there are accidents, but if it makes people feel better to spend road improvement money to make them feel safer, without doing that much for safety, who am I to argue? Democracy and P.R. win.
As long as there is no mandatory bike lane law and the fun-to-enforce 4ft passing distance law, I'll be avoiding those accommodations.
Gladly Cleveland Circle is no longer on any regular routes for me.
It used to be easy to get through except for horrendous surfaces and the odd aggressive more than assertive. If you pick clear line of travel, most drivers don't have a problem.
Yes, I was so happy to see
Yes, I was so happy to see this proposal! I ride my bike from West Rox to appointments near St. E’s all the time, and Chestnut Hill Ave is such a pain through there. I can’t wait to see how they reconfigure the roads!
So glad this is happening…
We should do similar mobility walks in more neighborhoods to ensure our communities are safe and accessible for all.
I cross from the NW to NE corner a lot
i.e. from the skating rink to Cityside Tavern, and the biggest issue is how uneven the surface is. Huge bumps everywhere, chunks of pavement cracked away all around the Green Line (trolley repositioning) tracks on Chestnut Hill Ave., crumbling curbs, concave gas and sewer patches, etc. A real mess!
So one of the best solutions would be a proper repaving - hopefully incorporating some kind of flexible pavement technology that respects the pavement heaving caused by the expansion and shifting of the trolley tracks. Does that exist?
Also, a lot of southbound traffic on Chestnut Hill Ave. likes to bang an illegal uey around the island on Chestnut Hill Ave. to get into the entrance of Sutherland Rd. in front of 7-11. Please make sure they can't do that anymore. TIA!
The primary hazard for cyclists
is crossing the multiple trolley tracks at right angles without veering into other traffic.